Categories
Dream Journal

Apt #99

These dreams all take place at night for no particular reason.

Earliest remembered is playing on a school athletic field where I’m not a student. But I manage to successfully fit in, heading in with the rest of them and peeking over the wall into the locker room to see what I’m getting myself into.

Having friends over in my new place, Apt #99 (the only double digit unit on the second floor). I become more aware that it’s cheap and somewhat sketchy building with weird architecture. The hallways and stairways especially are dark and dingy, but with an unusually intense vibe of human activity. Maybe it’s like a one-building Kowloon Walled City — except I think the second floor is the top. I’m up and down the stairs several times, giving instructions on how to find stuff to one of my visitors.

I’m informed by some Mormon friends of a free trip to China. It’s sponsored by our school, but takes only one day. Feels like far from enough, and mysteriously so. I wonder what the Chinese face recognition would make of my all-too-Western face.

Participating in a survey of the Great Lakes and their borders. My favorite is a smallisg lake located higher up between others called King Lake. The view there is very interesting, as from the vantage of its center one can see a ring of the other lakes below. But on a newly released map it’s been labeled “Piss Lake” because locals don’t like the smell and think it doesn’t have enough bathrooms. Near King Lake there’s a small cabin perched on a hill that’s supposed to have a groundskeeper, but when I visit it just has a cat napping on an armchair. I fondly start thinking of him as the groundskeeper.

The Great Lakes also has an international border, and I visit a liquor store near there on land that should never have been claimed. The man who built this place, the so-called owner, has punted on the issue for ages by avoiding paperwork to clear it up. Because of the legal complexities with the border no one has been motivated enough to sort the situation out, and he continues running his business only semi-legally. I have some idea of what the place was like before and so I’m made a bit sad by learning all this.

Later I’m working as an impromptu messenger. In a thick forest on expansive level terrain adjacent to an outpost, I deliver a message to a hidden group. The member I meet uses a mech to traverse the dense terrain. As soon as my message is delivered however, my government launches a nuclear missile at the location where we met. Luckily the rendezvous is not where the other side’s base is, and actually 20 miles away. But now how am I supposed to get them to trust me/us again now? I’ve been manipulated and there’s no easy way to get that across.

Visiting a restaurant in Wyoming which is full old-timey themed. A photo posted in the review shows diners dressed up in frontier style dresses, oversized frilly things which are more Victorian extravagance than Midwestern demure. The cloth patterns remain very much Little House on the Prairie or Potato Sack Dress though, a pleasant combination. The photo’s poster has chosen to recolor their original wide angle image and overlaid a pastel rainbow coloration across it. Another interesting detail is that each table has its own container of dry ice which spills fog across the diners and food — something I would expect more for Halloween than the old west, but this is essentially a cosplay restaurant and the effect is fun. Reecy fits in well among the crowd. She told me about the place (she may have taken me, actually). But since I’m currently traveling all I have with me appropriate to wear is a colorful squarish-patterned shirt with black lapels, which feels underdressed. I find a rainbow bowtie to go with it and feel just a smidge finer.

Somewhere in here, I wake up from dental surgery, having had my chipped premolar that’s been bothering me for years finally removed — wake up in the dream, that is. I’m kind of surprised that it finally worked.

Categories
Dream Journal

Chaos Ghost Derby

A railroad encircles the edge of Sacramento river delta vineyards. Slow journey. I’m a kid, and it’s a parallel journey to my flight back home after a living abroad — flying across the entire continental USA and landing somewhere in Oregon. My parent says we’re going home, to the pine state, but I check my weekly predictions and foresee several saddle & ranch-themed places and events… dusty winds from the East.

I’m a ghost, a spirit, and I’m called to enact the Destruction Derby. A motorboat near the scenic park-side boardwalk splits in existential mitosis, splitting again into four motorboats, panicking at my invisible intensity. Other boats flee into the sides of houses trying to escape my wake. After the chaos, while clothed in humanness, I witness buses driving around torn in half, motorcycles needing to be un-embedded from the street. There’s great disorder and possible loss of life, but I only do it once in awhile and I’m not me when I do it, anyway. And I’m never mean. In fact, I’m fair.

Afterwards, Betty and many other girls are being evacuated, marched out in formation. In semi-ghost form I squeeze butts & hips. New girl with them is like “and… you randomly just sometimes have a ghost feel you up after this stuff happens? HUH.”

Categories
Dream Journal

Fan Dads! at The Old Western Zoo

Fan Dads!Somewhere on vacation with Lynae, a specialty zoo with a quirky-healthy-family vibe, uniquely Mormon/Utah. We decide to go back a second day — something we’ve never done before. Get there late in the afternoon, so late I wonder if it’s still worth it. Paying admission is a long chore… exchanging coins for a donation slot, Lynae finally making change herself from the cash register, leaving notes on slips of paper for the individual drawers. There are some obvious indications of a seedy underbelly: repeated graffiti pieces and tags on the Old West log cabin facade (a consequence of being so far out on a country road), a hollowed-out warehouse across the street, where local teenagers congregate. I witness a bizarre and memorable instance of albino giraffes galloping through a dilapidated Fort Ord-like building of broken glass, rusty support columns, and families with young children.

We climb aboard a personal paddleboat-steamer-themed mini train and go through a set of swinging saloon doors. I immediately spot a few large folding knives in a water feature. I retrieve one (hey, free knives!) and it’s comically huge, the size of a sword, branded as ‘Bowie’ — not a Bowie knife, though. Turns out people have a habit of discarding their knives in this particular ride after they stab someone. Like I said: seedy underbelly.

I make my way out of the visitor areas of the park and access a back room with rows of rickety shelves, like a rural garden nursery, stacked with curious merchandise. They’re aging avocado water here for instance. Here I find what is certainly a unique marketing demographic: Fan Dads! That is, men of a certain age who enjoy working with all manner of circulation systems, professionally or as a hobby, who nurture a passion for controlling flow of hot/cold, water/air/oil, or rotational propulsion! I see a beautiful silhouette of myself testing one of these boy-toys, plumes of air or water billowing from my face. Of course I manage to tip over a weathered old shelf and just catch it before disaster strikes. Gah, the maintenance with this place! To be fair, I wasn’t supposed to be there.

I don’t know why I find Fan Dads inordinately hilarious, but… Fan Dads! I’ve been saying it in my head for like 2 hours. Fan Dads!

Categories
Dream Journal

Sleeping in the Truck, Portland Parking Lot

Doing deliveries, there’s an accident involving a moving truck at an intersection, and the motorcyclist rides off angrily. I know the bike (Nissan) and ride off after them, coming across the abandoned bike near a low wall of a building owned by Chicken. In the semi-underground room, I start working, even though I know Chicken could be pissed. Eventually he shows up and yells at someone (Jimmy?) wanting me gone; we never even make eye contact.

Waiting in a line for older veterans, slowly climbing the staircase of something like a child’s playhouse to hand over our books, I’m given a cut in line when an older black guy (looks like professor in Man From Earth) stops on staircase. A friendly girl takes mine but is visibly confused, having never seen one like it before. The playhouse is on a train and I walk behind it as it slowly edges into a siding.

Mickey dead? Replaced with a toy crying baby in coffin, we’re unsure what his wishes were to present this to his family. It’s an Old West context, stagecoaches and cowboy hats.

Huge wild flock of cat-penguin-monkeys outside a monastery can be approached, even picked up, because the elder cat-penguin-monkeys will take their cues from the monks also watching nearby.

Josh cancels his wedding the day before, I’m sad and don’t know how to engage him so I ask ”laundry day?” when I run into him on a corner of Mission Street. It’s laundry day, I guess.

Lynae has a problem where she’s been panhandling then using the change to buy goose eggs to sell, but she keeps getting the occasional fertilized one and it upsets her and others.